About The Author

All personal websites worth their salt have a miniature biography of the protagonist. This one is no different.

I am and indeed always have been James Masterton. I seem mysteriously to no longer be in my 30s. I live and work in London and somehow manage to hold down a variety of jobs all at once.

My day job is as a producer for a well known national radio station. I gave up a long time ago being coy about exactly who for so there are enough clues and outright statements in the main text of the site. Nonetheless, given that I don’t write in any official capacity for them it makes sense just to say, if you want to find out who I work for then it is a fairly simple matter to do so. I’m not telling you here however.

I’ve also been writing about the UK singles chart online since 1992. From humble beginnings on usenet the weekly column about the ins and outs of the British charts has featured on websites such as dotmusic.com, Yahoo! Music UK and Ireland and About.com. Since June 2016 the column has been published on its own Chart Watch UK site, the link to which is at the top of this page.

On the back of this I’ve made several media appearances – appearing on Channel 4’s “100 Worst Pop Records” back in 2004 most notoriously and in 2012 on a BBC4 documentary about 60 years of the pop charts – and my words of wisdom can sometimes be seen on the BBC website when they phone me up for a quote or two. I often pop up on radio shows when an enthusiastic chart pundit is required, these range from Radio 2 documentaries on the charts to the odd live phone piece on local radio stations.

Incidentally, if you ever want to use me as a guest on your show, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Just email me here.

My books, The Top 40 Annuals 2012, 2013 and 1988 are available from all leading E-book stores and in paperback through Amazon. Just click on the Books page for more information.